Re: Updating po files on make dist

[Kjartan Maraas <kmaraas broadpark no>]

ons, 21.05.2003 kl. 22.09 skrev Christian Rose:
> ons 2003-05-21 klockan 21.49 skrev Christophe Fergeau:
> > make distcheck has the unfortunate side effect of modifying all po
> > files, so all translations end up being updated in cvs each time a
> > module is released. These modifications of the po files don't bring
> > anything (they don't add or remove translated strings, they mostly
> > change line numbers in all comments in those files and stuff like that).
> 
> There's one situation when updating po files in cvs as a result of make
> dist is beneficial, and that is when the module has many messages and
> many old (not recently updated) translations. Then regenerating all po
> files and putting these back into cvs can save some substantial build
> time for those building from cvs.
> 
> In practice this should rarely be needed though. Few modules have that
> many messages and that many old translations to warrant this. The
> example that comes to mind was that this was the case for Nautilus once,
> and I can imagine that Evolution also occasionally needs this with its
> more than 6000 messages. In such cases, announcing in advance to
> gnome-i18n@gnome.org that the po files in cvs will be touched at release
> time is appreciated.
> 
> In all other cases, committing po files that were touched by make dist
> is just a nuisance that most translators would want to go away as soon
> as possible (see below).
> 
> 
> > On the other hand, if a translator has a modified po file on his
> > computer that he hasn't committed yet, the next time he cvs updates,
> > he'll get a conflict for most of the strings in this file, which makes
> > resolving the conflicts next to impossible.
> 
> This unfortunately happens quite often, and correctly resolving such
> conflicts is in many cases non-trivial. And the problem is even more
> worrying as most "make dist touched the po file" commits are totally
> unnecessary. They also make unnecessary garbage for someone trying to
> follow cvs history for a po file.
> 
I just want to add to this that I've never had a problem with people
commiting the changed po files to CVS. What I do when I get a conflict
is just mv .#no.po-some-version-number no.po and carry on as before. A
single command resolves the problem and I really think the benefits of
having a consistent po dir outweighs the downside here...

Just my 2 øre

Cheers
Kjartan